Fact check: Why Rush Limbaugh's climate change statement is full of hot air

By John KruzelPolitiFact.com

Thursday

Feb 21, 2019 at 5:41 AM

Conservative pundit Rush Limbaugh dismissed climate change as the work of agenda-driven computer models spitting out threats that loom just beyond the horizon, where scientists can elude accountability for their dubious predictions.

"Climate change is nothing but a bunch of computer models that attempt to tell us what's going to happen in 50 years or 30," Limbaugh said on Fox News Sunday. "Notice the predictions are never for next year or the next ten years. They're always for way, way, way, way out there, when none of us are going to be around or alive to know whether or not they were true."

What's not true, in this case, is what Limbaugh said. We'll explain why with the help of scientists.

The first problem with Limbaugh’s claim is this: Climate change is already happening. Its impact is seen around the world.

Here’s the topline: The broad scientific consensus is that human factors are the main contributor to global warming, with carbon dioxide emissions primarily driving up Earth’s temperature, which are now at record levels.

"We can simply look at the actual climate record," said Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. "The Earth is now hotter than it has ever been."

The past four years were the hottest on record, according to an analysis by the World Meteorological Organization of five leading international datasets. In 2018, the oceans as a whole — which contain most of Earth’s energy — were the hottest on record, according to an international panel of scientists who track the data.

What’s more, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading authority on climate change has concluded with high confidence that "impacts on natural and human systems from global warming have already been observed."

Last summer, the Arctic ice cover in the Svalbard area of Norway was found to be 40 percent below average for that time of year, according to the Norwegian Ice Service, which tracks data going back to 1981.

Scientists also point to an uptick in extreme weather. Trenberth noted that rainfalls are heavier in most places around the world, and that 2015 was the most active hurricane year globally on record.

"It’s not just ‘a bunch of computer models,’ " said Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist and director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "Climate change is visible in hundreds of independent observational data sets of land, ice, ocean, ecosystems."

Limbaugh said climate predictions are always pegged to some distant future, "when none of us are going to be around or alive to know whether or not they were true."

But what about predictions from decades past?

According to Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist with Berkeley Earth, these older projections have largely been borne out.

"Broadly speaking, climate models have been quite skillful over the past 30 years in predicting warming in the years after they were published," said Hausfather, who assessed previous climate change models in an analysis for the website Carbon Brief.

He cited the example of Columbia University scientist Wally Broecker, who in 1975 predicted global temperatures would rise due to increased CO2 emissions.

"Broecker predicted by 2010 the world would have warmed by around 0.74C," Hausfather said. "In reality, it warmed by 0.62C, which is pretty good for a very rudimentary climate model in the 1970s."

Scientists often focus on longer-term projections because a warming trend, relative to natural variability, can be seen more clearly from this timeframe, said John Reilly, a climate scientist at MIT.

Our ruling:

Limbaugh said, "Climate change is nothing but a bunch of computer models that attempt to tell us what's going to happen in 50 years or 30. Notice the predictions are never for next year or the next ten years. They're always for way, way, way, way out there, when none of us are going to be around or alive to know whether or not they were true."

First, global warming is already happening. Earth is the hottest it has ever been, and the impact is observable.